


Mad Scientist

by WoozleBucket



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos is a Mad Scientist (Welcome to Night Vale), Dimension Travel, M/M, Mad Science, Memory Alteration, Minor Character Death, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 01:51:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14321913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WoozleBucket/pseuds/WoozleBucket
Summary: The mad scientist has left his building.





	Mad Scientist

The mad scientist has left his building. 

He’s small and could be beautiful under the stains and the ash. He walks with a purpose, as if he’s walked this road before. He hasn’t. He’s never left the building before. His impeccable lab coat billows behind him. Like a cloud, but clouds hold angels, which are not real. And he’s marching to the radio station, blinking machine in his hand, and he’s powerful. 

He gets to the station and looks at his machine. And then he yells at the building something along the lines of, _“Turn down your radiation! You’re interfering with science!”_

And then poor Intern Yvette comes out to usher him away, poor, poor Intern Yvette. Poor Intern Yvette, who is currently a pile of ashes sitting in the station’s good dustpan on top of the front desk awaiting her parents for reformation. 

And then the mad scientist leaves, storming back down the street to his lab by Big Rico’s, and we never see him again. 

-

The mad scientist has left his building again, Machine in pocket, Science Ray in hand. He can hear the radio talk about him. It’s shocked that he has a face under the soot. It’s crooning about how his face is beautiful under the soot. It’s wondering how he can hear it from outside, for his radio is currently crammed down his garbage disposal after another failed experiment. 

He gets to the forest and glares at it. It whines. It pouts. It begs for him to come deeper. It spits out a compliment and goes silent enough for him to walk in and out easily. 

_“You want him back,”_ it says. _“Fat chance, buddy.”_

He doesn’t dignify it with a response. He’s too old for this, the grey in his temples is spreading to his hairline. The radio marvels at his stoicness, how he can effortlessly kill a faceless child without even stopping to smell its roses. The radio wonders how he can walk so easily and so far without having left his building for, well, forever. The answer is the exercise bike that powers the basement. The radio goes to the weather as he gets to the station. 

He knocks. “You’re interfering. With science.”

The station knocks back. “Science isn’t real.”

His gun hand twitches, but he instead hold up the Machine and points the screen towards the doors. “Real! This is real!”

The doors hum. “Is anything real?”

“I am,” he says. Final. That’s final. He waves his Science Gun around to further his point, that’s what mad scientists do. 

“Oh, in that case,” the doors open. 

He flinches at the interior and at the scared-looking intern behind the front desk. 

“Hey, kid,” he says. The kid jumps. “Tell your bosses to turn their radiation down. Uh. Tell them that Carlos said to turn their radiation down.”

The kid’s eyes widen and they scurry to the back office, and the scientist leaves, barely flinching at the screams and the radio sighing over his name. 

_“Carlos,”_ it says. _“Perfect Carlos.”_

-

Someone left a plate of rice cakes on his doorstep. The scientist accepts them and ignores the radio gushing about his confused expression, it’s dreamy, it’s beautiful, Carlos hates it. The radio should shut up about him for once. 

“Shut up,” he says to the officer under his stove. “My life, not the radio’s.”

“Sorry,” says the officer. 

The radio exclaims that he knew that the officer was under his stove and not in his furnace as she was before. _“Smart Carlos.”_

Of course he’s smart, he’s a scientist. And scientists are...smart. He keeps forgetting the phrase. He needs to finish soon. 

The radiation is lower than it’s been in years, so he can finish with the Tubes and move on to the Other Tubes. The Other Tubes need more time, at least two months, so he sits at his bike and starts charging the battery. Again. 

-

The mad scientist has killed a librarian, and he didn’t even use the provided pair of safety scissors to do it. The radio is impressed. Carlos is just tired. Tamika is impressed. Carlos wants her to leave him alone. She wants to learn _science_ , but Carlos isn’t a teacher. Never was. Or he was. Or he wasn’t. Everything is running together these days. 

He points the Science Gun at her, not looking up from his book, and she finally goes off to the other side of the library. The librarians won’t come near. He’s the mad scientist, everybody knows not to go near him. She’s Tamika Flynn. End of story. 

_“I wonder if he ever listens”_ , muses the radio. The librarians screech at it. Carlos wants to laugh and cry and groan at the announcer’s idiocy, all at the same time. He ends up doing a mixture of the three, and it gives him a headache. _“Of course he doesn’t, he has science to do! And a scientist doesn’t listen to community radio.”_

Carlos would correct him if he remembered what he was trying to correct. 

-

The mad scientist finishes his machine and stands back to admire it. It’s big. It’s grey. It’s also green, which he isn’t sure about, because it clashes slightly, but it’s also green. And it has the words _“S.S. Cecil”_ on the side in big red letters. Now that, that clashes. 

All he needs is a power source. And the last source was a temporal monsoon. And the next one of those is in approximately ten years, which may or may not happen tomorrow or next week. But he can’t wait for that. He’s barely remembering anything other than the present and the fake past. 

He’s been here in this building for his entire life. He came to be in the non-existent sixth floor, his lab is in the triply-existent basement. He was born in Static, Kansas and moved to Night Vale in 2012 to investigate. He can’t remember what he was trying to investigate. He’s been alone for his entire life, he had Laynee and Harvey and Lee and Rosa and Nishat. The voice on the radio grates against his ears, the voice on the radio feels like home. 

But he needs a power source. So he’ll get one. 

He calls Old Woman Josie and puts on his nicest voice. The voice that doesn’t sound rough after doubling over laughing for two days straight, manically cackling. The voice that hadn’t gone through the throat spiders because throat spiders aren’t real here. And he asks for a singular...houseguest, because angels aren’t real. 

But she doesn’t send one. The officer tapping the line laughs and he can hear their shoulders shaking. So Carlos sighs and pulls on his good lab coat, the one with both sleeves intact and only slightly-singed. And he goes to visit her, attracting more stares than usual, and he glares back, and he knows that he looks insane. And he’s always looked like that. But he hasn’t, has he? But he can’t remember. So he doesn’t. 

He knocks on Old Woman Josie’s door and crosses his arms and waits. And a Not-Angel comes out with a sigh and shoos him away. But he won’t go, he can’t. He has to get home. 

“Please,” he says. Begs, even though he doesn’t beg. “I’m not from here. I need to get home.”

“Mr. Mad Scientist?” asks the old woman in the doorway. The Not-Angel moves to stand in front of her, and she hobbles through it with a muttered apology, squinting at Carlos intensely. “You’re shorter than I remember.”

“Yes,” he nods. He is shorter than she would remember, and it isn’t the quicksand this time. “That’s because I’m not the mad scientist. I am from another dimension, and I need to get home.”

“Home is where the heart is,” she muses. She leans forward onto her staff. 

“My heart is in my Night Vale,” he replies. “And...I need to get back to him.”

She chuckles lightly. “And you need Erika.”

“For power. Spiritual energy. Whichever Erika you can spare.”

The nearest Erika steps forward and screeches. Carlos would have backed up if he was home. But he instead just stands there and doesn’t blink, hand itching for his Science Ray, Old Woman Josie laughing lightly. It sounds like a rusty windchime, worn and crying out for its mother. 

“Erika agrees, but only if you buy them pizza first,” she says. “They haven’t had pizza before.”

So the mad scientist takes the Not-Angel out for pizza. The waitress pointedly ignores Erika and delivers a single slice (scorpion and boysenberry, his usual). He slides it across the table, not caring if the Secret Police are watching. Which they are, for his own protection. He’ll be gone soon enough, anyway. 

When the two of them get down to the lab, there’s a Secret Police member in front of the door. Erika bristles. Carlos pulls out his Science Ray and shoots the officer dead. Easy. This is what he does. It’s what mad scientists do. 

“It’s what we do,” he explains as they enter. There’s another officer on the way, he can feel it in the air and he can smell it on the wind. Bologna. New scent. 

Erika goes to the machine and glares at it. They’re supposedly omnipotent. (or omniscient- Carlos is a scientist, not an etymologist.) They know what the machine does. 

“You knew what you were getting into,” he says, going over to the machine and typing on the somehow-already-rusty keypad. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but Carlos the Mad Scientist knows exactly what he’s doing. One advantage of becoming another person is knowing what said other person knows. 

Erika grumbles and seems to ready itself as there’s a polite knock on the door. And then a slightly-less polite knock from inside of the furnace. 

“Mr. Mad Scientist, please step away from the science,” the officer inside of the furnace says. “And, uh, the mysterious cloud-shaped being next to you that I am not acknowledging.” 

Carlos, in fact, does not step away from his science. And Erika pokes the machine, he smacks their hand away with a, _“Not yet.”_

The officer behind the door knocks again. “Mr. Mad Scientist, we do not want to use force.”

The machine beeps and the furnace spits the officer out with a disgusted sound. Carlos grabs the machine’s handles and holds tight, nudging Erika towards the power chamber thing with his foot. It goes through them, but the Not-Angel takes the cue and moves towards the power chamber thing. And Erika touches the power chamber thing, the officer cries out, and Carlos is swept away with a blur of color and a splash of blood and a dash of yet another existential crisis. 

-

He stumbles to his feet in his living room, the machine’s charred remains in his hands, and he cheers. Cecil looks up from the couch with a pleasant expression. 

“Pleasant trip?” he asks, as if nothing had happened between Carlos stepping into the other room to check on the mushrooms and now when Carlos seemingly teleports into the living room, charred and smoking and covered in liquid angel. 

Incredibly tired from the most difficult trans-dimensional travel that he’s had for a while, Carlos flops onto the couch and flops onto Cecil and moans. 

Cecil chuckles and pats Carlos’s back. “That bad, huh?”

“My hair was a mess.”

“I’m sure that it was still perfect.”

Carlos sighs and snakes his hand down to grab Cecil’s. “Yeah, it was.”

**Author's Note:**

> Uhhhh never wrote night vale before whoops forgive me
> 
> Blog: @WoozleBucket on Tumblr. Check me out for whatever, it's fine, sure, whatever.


End file.
